Fruitmarket Gallery, Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Edinburgh Castle
30 July — 25 September 2005
While running counter to global technocratic culture, spiritualism customarily acts as a dramatic subterfuge. Tantalizing us with the anticipation of spectral spectacle is the key to the successful failure of Guo-Qiang’s Edinburgh Festival projects. Kicking off with a bang, Black Rainbow — a series of fireworks exploded in broad daylight — sounded better than it looked. The breeze promptly despatched the ensuing smoke westwards and left Edinburghers fearing jihad. Rather than a damp squib, however, Black Rainbow was a welcome counterpoint to the spectacular fireworks remorselessly ejaculated from the Castle every August evening, and a memorandum that gunpowder is a menacing amusement.
The downstairs space of the Fruitmarket Gallery, meanwhile, has been psychopathologically darkened and sown with plantain trees which, in Guo-Qiang’s hometown, are thought to attract banshees. Their leaves are painted with excerpts from ghost stories collated by writer James Robertson. The texts range from taunts: ‘You cannie catch me, for a wee bawbee’, to unintended puns: ‘I was shaking like a leaf but was unsure of exactly what had happened.’ In an adjacent room, time-lapsed CCTV footage plays of the same trees after dark. All is eerily still and curiously ominous, the lifeless stare of CCTV intimating latent terror. Expectations run high but nothing stirs. Combining spectacle and surveillance, the installation ingeniously sensationalizes the conflict between ‘critical’ values of lucidity and rationality and ‘mystifying’ qualities of opacity, confusion and sensation – Occidentalism and Orientalism.
Beneath a cloud of Chinese joss dolls, the gunpowder and ink portraits in the upstairs gallery illustrate Scots with an interest in the spirit world. The figures include infamous Satanist Aleister Crowley, folklorish characters such as the Braham Seer, the Lady of Lawers and Bald Agnes, and novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There is also a portrait of Little Annie, a child who is said to haunt nearby Mary King’s Close, a street closed off during the time of the Black Death. While the subject matter is fascinating, the images themselves fail to do it justice. They lack the ephemerality of real fireplay and are overly marked by Guo-Qiang’s neo-expressionist signature.
An additional project with the Scottish National Portrait Gallery is equally hesitant. From the collection, Guo-Qiang has selected death masks of notorious killers produced for phrenological and physiognomical studies, pseudo-sciences now regarded to be as constructive as alchemy. As is the case with much of the exhibition, this is really an exercise in autosuggestion; if we want to see ‘criminal’ traits in the faces of the rogues’ gallery we will, but only because we have been told to. Guo-Qiang is showing us how easily people are persuaded. Indeed, the aestheticization of science, particularly as it pertains to racist pseudo-sciences such as eugenics and craniometry, is over-fished by artists. This project is too obvious and lacks Guo-Qiang’s contemplative opacity; the busts don’t require the same leap of faith needed to imagine vaporous villainy around the plantains; they are already personified in plastic form and leave little to our imaginations.
